In industrial plants such as chemical plants, plants that manage and control well heads such as in gas fields or petroleum fields, and the surrounding areas, plants that manage and control electrical generation such as hydroelectric, thermoelectric, and nuclear power generation, plants that manage and control environmental electric power such as from solar light or wind power, or a plant that manages and controls water and sewage or a dam, distributed control systems (DCSs) to which on-site devices such as measuring instruments or actuators known as field devices and control devices that controls them are connected via a communication means are built to implement a high degree of automated operation. In a plant in which such a distributed control system is implemented, from the standpoint of preventing erroneous operation and maintaining measurement accuracy, operators maintain field devices (hereinafter sometimes abbreviated “devices”), either periodically or irregularly.
The maintenance of field devices, for example, is performed using a device maintenance apparatus capable of communication with a field device, either wirelessly or by cable. The device maintenance apparatus, for example, is a computer such as a laptop or tablet computer, a PDA (personal digital assistant), or a smartphone into which a dedicated program for performing maintenance on the field device has been installed. The field device can hold one or a plurality of device information. Device information is information regarding the field device, being, for example, information for setting operation of the field device, information indicating the state of the field device, or identification of the field device. The device maintenance apparatus reads and verifies the device information set in the field device, sets new device information into the field device, or changes the device information set in the field device.
The device maintenance apparatus displays on a display screen the history of device information acquired from the maintenance-target field device as history information. The device maintenance apparatus also specifies the field device and displays maintenance information regarding maintenance of a specified field device (refer to, for example, Patent Reference 1). The device information included in the history information or the device information included in the maintenance information can be displayed as device information extracted by extraction conditions, by setting extraction conditions (a filter) for each.